The disclosures herein relate generally to partitioning a hard disk and, more particularly, to a system and method for partitioning a hard disk during installation of a network operating system (xe2x80x9cOSxe2x80x9d) that requires minimal user intervention.
Preparing (i.e., partitioning and formatting) a hard disk usually requires copying the DOS utilities fdisk.exe (xe2x80x9cFDISKxe2x80x9d) and format.exe (xe2x80x9cFORMATxe2x80x9d) to a floppy disk, after which a system administrator manually configures the partitions using FDISK. After running FDISK, the computer system must be rebooted prior to formatting the hard disk using the FORMAT utility, so that the OS can recognize the newly created partition(s). The volume label for the primary partition must be entered using the FORMAT utility. This is a tedious manual process.
The Dell Server Assistant (xe2x80x9cDSAxe2x80x9d) available from Dell Computer Systems of Round Rock, Tex., is a bootable compact disk (xe2x80x9cCDxe2x80x9d) used to set up server systems, including installing a network OS thereon. The DSA boots into a Windows 9x environment in which partitioning software cannot normally be run. To enhance the customer experience, it is desirable that the DSA program enable selection of the hard disk partition information and then reboot the computer system to partition and format the hard disk. It is further desirable that no user interaction, other than selecting the size of the partition and the volume label, be required during this process.
Although tools exist that can partition and format hard disks with minimal user intervention, it is usually not advisable to ship such tools to customers, as doing so would potentially expose valuable intellectual property to those customers. Ideally, a required subset of the functionality would be shipped in a manner that does not compromise intellectual property rights.
Therefore, what is needed is a method and apparatus for partitioning a hard disk during installation of a network OS with minimal user intervention.
One embodiment, accordingly, provides a method and apparatus for partitioning a hard disk during installation of a network OS. To that end, a method of preparing a hard disk of a computer during installation of a network operating system thereon, includes prompting a user to specify disk preparation data for the hard disk. The data is stored in a self-loading binary image (SLBI). The computer system is rebooted from the SLBI. The hard disk is formatted and partitioned using the disk preparation data. A master partition table (MPT) of the hard disk is updated to include a partition descriptor for each of at least one partition created during the formatting and partitioning, wherein one such partition descriptor is marked as active. The computer system is then rebooted.
A principal advantage of this embodiment is that it facilitates the preparation of a hard disk during OS installation while ensuring that valuable intellectual property rights are not compromised.
Another advantage of this embodiment is that it eliminates the necessity of booting from a floppy disk running MS-DOS to prepare a hard disk.